All of this suggests that the federal government has for a long time been operating under an unspoken monetary theory, namely, that government spending does not need to be backed by revenues and that the debt issued to fill the gap between spending and revenues will have little effect now or in the future.

But isn't there some level of federal debt which would cripple the federal government and the U.S. economy? A common metric for measuring this debt is the ratio of federal debt to annual gross domestic product (GDP). When one looks at a graph of this, the growth in debt seems perilous, rising from a low of around 30 percent of GDP in the early 1980s to more than 100 percent of GDP today.

Seemingly more perilous is the rapid growth in Japanese government debt. That debt has soared from a low of around 40 percent of GDP in 1990 to almost 200 percent of GDP now. Yet, the oft-prophesied demise of Japanese government finance has not occurred.

What the United States and Japan share in this regard is that each issues its own sovereign currency. That means both could theoretically retire their entire government debt in one day by issuing sufficient currency to buy up all the outstanding bonds. (A smarter way would be to do this very gradually without announcing it. In the alternative, the legislature could pass a law requiring government bondholders to sell their bonds back to government at a pre-determined price—something bondholders would certainly dislike since the price is likely to favor the government.)

What this tells us is that any government that issues its own currency will never run out of money to pay back bondholders. That's, in part, why there is no panic among Japanese and American owners of government debt. What the above further tells us is a bit more shocking: Such governments don't even need to issue debt to finance their operations.

And, so long as a government doesn't issue more currency than the economy can produce goods and services for, it won't create price inflation (defined as too much money chasing too few goods).*

The only reason for governments which control their own currency to levy taxes then is to create demand for that currency. If someone has to pay taxes in the government-issued currency, he or she will want to receive at least some payment in that currency. As it turns out, so will everyone else. As a result it becomes simply more convenient if everyone adopts the country's sovereign currency as their unit of account and medium of exchange.

All of what I've just described fits neatly into what is called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), the premises of which are so deceptively simple that it is hard for people to believe them. But Japan and the United States seem already to be operating under that theory save for one act—the act of issuing copious amounts of government debt, something that is entirely unnecessary under MMT.

The idea that governments which issue their own sovereign currency must rely on private credit—mostly from wealthy citizens—to finance themselves is an illusion. But it's an illusion that the monied class hopes no one will see through. For if the public does see through it, government debt—which is used like a weapon to promote cuts in social spending—would cease to frighten anyone (and may be gradually eliminated). That means spending policy would become much more flexible than previously imagined.

So, it turns out that Dick Cheney was right—but not for reasons which he and the new rentier class would ever be willing to admit, namely, that the government doesn't need loans from rich people or loans of any kind. Bondholders therefore can't really hold the government hostage. Realizing this and acting on it would seriously diminish the influence of the rich in the halls of power and make a realignment of spending priorities possible.

__________________________________

*This is an important check on the creation of money. A complete discussion of this would require a separate piece covering the physical limits the economy faces with regard to resources (especially energy), climate and infrastructure.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, December 17, 2017

Are we wrong to believe that competitiveness must and always will be the central animating principle of human action? Media studies scholar Michael Karlberg thinks so. In fact, he believes that another animating principle, mutualism, is both central to human interaction and necessary to aid human society in meeting the myriad challenges it faces regarding climate change, inequality, governance, education and many other issues.

I saw Karlberg speak recently at a private gathering in Washington, D.C. He is measured in his tone, clear in his delivery and compelling in his logic. He poses the following question: If nearly all of our institutions are premised on competition (commerce, politics, education, recreation and many others), is it any wonder that our competitive instincts are honed and expanded while our cooperative ones atrophy?

Karlberg is not naive enough to believe that all this can be changed overnight. But he does make a convincing case that competitiveness is as much a problem emanating from social institutions that inculcate and incentivize competition as it is a problem of human nature.

The way forward, he asserts, is to build new institutions that emphasize cooperation; it's a sizable task, but one which has already begun as he explains at the end of a TEDx talk which he gave in 2012. However utopian this goal may seem, Karlberg reminds us that the current "culture of contest," as he styles it, has given us the existential threat of climate change spawned by endless economic growth and consumption. In fact, the "culture of contest" is creating a series of social and ecological challenges so profound that unless we change that culture we may drive ourselves toward extinction.

Not surprisingly, the competitive view of human nature is dominant in how we conduct international relations. In another presentation I saw recently international lawyer and scholar Sovaida Maani Ewing asserted that international relations based on national self-interest merely results in a world that lurches from crisis to crisis. Ewing, who runs the Center for Peace & Global Governance, suggested that long-term stability in international relations will only come from agreements based on shared principles. That sounds very much like a move away from the "culture of contest."

Karlberg and Ewing clearly have a contrarian and more hopeful view of human nature than we are used to. Is there evidence that they are right? Is it possible that what makes humans happy isn't consumerism and competition, but sufficiency and cooperative relations? Quite possibly the answer is yes according to a recent piece in The New Yorker magazine which summarizes the main arguments of scholar James C. Scott's new book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.

Scott, it seems, doesn't buy into the putative superiority of modern governance and social organization over more "primitive" forms. He is, however, not a mere primitivist for he cites new understandings and evidence of the earliest settlements. According to the New Yorker piece Scott believes the agricultural revolution was "for most of the people living through it, a disaster" resulting in poorer health, rising inequality, slavery and other ills.

The summary continues: "War, slavery, rule by élites—all were made easier by another new technology of control: writing."

The same article touches on the Kalahari Bushmen, one of the last large groups of nomadic peoples in the world. What we know of them squares well with Scott's conclusions. The Bushmen do not accumulate surpluses, but live for the day, stopping their foraging when they get what they need to eat. Yet, they are well-fed with stable and felicitous social relations, valuing solidarity over competition and individual achievement.

The piece goes on to quote economist John Maynard Keynes as follows:

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

We are no closer to realizing today such a world than when Keynes wrote the above words. But here is the key point, according the article: "The study of hunter-gatherers, who live for the day and do not accumulate surpluses, shows that humanity can live more or less as Keynes suggests. It’s just that we’re choosing not to."

And, this brings us back to Michael Karlberg. Karlberg claims that the "culture of contest" is not a necessity so much as an artifact of a flawed, one-sided understanding of human nature. The Kalahari Bushmen provide a window into our human past that suggests Karlberg might very well be right.

What that past tells us is that humans are far more complex than we imagined—that is, they are not merely self-maximizing machines—and far more influenced by the incentives of the system in which they are enmeshed. And this conclusion counsels hope for the project championed by Karlberg and for a world that desperately needs the cooperation which would emerge as a result.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, December 03, 2017

Some people claim that humans—called breatharians—can live on air alone. Others claim we can have economic growth without increasing our resource use, so-called decoupling. Neither claim withstands scrutiny though here I am only going to deal with the second one.

Hidden beneath the claim of decoupling is the assertion that human well-being and economic growth are synonymous. But, human well-being is far from a one-dimensional economic variable linked unalterably to more income and consumption. So, saying that economic growth must at some point come to an end to maintain the habitability of the planet is not the same as saying that human well-being must also stop improving.

On the contrary, a stable society in harmony with the workings of the natural world in a way that maintains the habitability of the biosphere for humans would seem to be an essential characteristic of a society which offers a high degree of well-being to humans. Destroying that habitability through endless economic growth then is contrary to human well-being in the long run.

All of this should seem obvious. But so often the advocates of growth or "sustainable" growth tell us that ending growth would destroy the chance for countless people to attain well-being in our modern industrial world. While that has some truth within the narrow context that measures well-being as a function of economic output, it misses the point above. An uninhabitable world is really, really bad for human well-being.

The answer these advocates say is economic growth decoupled from increased resource use. But as two recent papers suggest, this is an oxymoron.

As "Is Decoupling GDP Growth from Environmental Impact Possible?" explains,while society has been getting gradually more efficient at producing goods and services, we are not anywhere near economic growth without increased resource use. The apparent decoupling in Germany and some other countries is probably due to the following factors:

1) substitution of one resource for another; 2) the financialization of one or more components of GDP that involves increasing monetary flows without a concomitant rise in material and/or energy throughput, and 3) the exporting of environmental impact to another nation or region of the world (i.e. the separation of production and consumption).

Moreover, there are limits to how efficient we can be. Each increment of efficiency becomes more and more expensive, rising steeply and prohibitively as we approach zero increase in resource use for any increment of growth—or as we move toward zero resource use from current levels while achieving the same level of economic output, a no-growth scenario. In short, we are never going to become breatharians.

A second paper suggests that matters are even worse because we are using the wrong measure. Instead of using output per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), we should be looking at resource use per capita. By that measure resource use has become far less efficient, expanding by 60 percent per person between 1900 and 2009. Of course, the goods and services provided have also expanded greatly. (But here again we would be making a direct and proportional link between human well-being and consumption when well-being is much more complex.)

The authors contrast this finding with one that claims that resource consumption dropped by 63 percent in that period—a claim that is true within the narrow context of output per unit of GDP, a measure of relative impact (relative to money) rather than absolute impact on the planet.

We humans would like to believe that we can achieve a society with all the material benefits we enjoy today widely distributed across the globe—but without the material. We can't do that without destroying the habitability of the planet. What we can do is focus on what really produces human well-being (and not just GDP growth) and make that the locus of our efforts while finding ways to reduce our impact on the planet on an absolute rather than a relative basis.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

When I say religion, I mean "worldview," and I believe the two are synonymous. Even if one has a supposedly secular worldview that relies on economics, psychology, biology or any other field for an explanation of how the world works, it will inevitably look like a religion since such worldviews have unquestioned (and often unquestionable!) premises and may make claims to explain all the social and/or physical phenomena we experience. These secular worldviews tend to be reductionist, describing the interactions of humans with one another and the physical world as nothing but a product of economic laws, human psychology or biological imperatives.

One cannot invent a religion. Religions either grow out of an accretion of spiritual and philosophical traditions over time or they start with a charismatic figure who brings a new set of ideas and standards into a society and is later labelled a divine prophet or the originator of a new philosophy or discipline.

The first two words are familiar to anyone affiliated with a religion. It is the equivalent of "Love thy neighbor." But the second phrase creates an altogether more expansive meaning for the first, implying that we should not only be kind to our fellow humans, but to all nonhuman entities, animate and inanimate.

Just embracing such an attitude would mark a profound shift in consciousness. Achieving it in practice would necessarily be a revolution in modern society—overturning practically everything we now do under the influence of a consciousness that does not give any autonomous value to natural entities. Instead, those entities are valued only for what we can extract from them for our benefit.

It seems axiomatic that in a connected world our kindness to nonhuman entities would redound to our benefit. We would probably not continue to undermine the habitability of the biosphere as much as we do. On the other hand, we would be obliged to create a much larger space for nonhuman participants in the biosphere and that would mean a significant reduction in what we call our "standard of living."

That seems like a reasonable tradeoff if it means that human culture would continue for a long time into the future instead of being threatened with extinction. Right now, however, we have made a devil's bargain which few people comprehend. We've traded away durability for near-term comfort. And, we've mistakenly classified our level of comfort as an index of the durability of our culture. Most people believe the structures and processes we've concocted are hardy when they are, in fact, fragile and prone to collapse.

A new religion/worldview would have to convince us as a species that the seeming tradeoff of less comfort for more durability is worthwhile. How that could happen remains opaque. But it points to a problem more basic than our flawed physical infrastructure. The very way we imagine the world is making it impossible to change our current perilous course.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

One assumption behind this falsely reassuring idea is that soil quality is somehow roughly uniform across the planet. But, of course, this is completely false. Soil quality and composition vary widely, often within walking distance on the same farm. Farmers simply moving north (or south in the Southern Hemisphere) in response to climate change will not automatically encounter soil suitable for farming.

We must also consider that lands not previously farmed may very well be forested. Knocking down the trees and clearing the stumps might make such lands arable. But the loss of carbon storage that trees represent would only make climate change worse.

Quite often we think of rural areas as being undeveloped. But nothing could be further from the truth. Agricultural regions have complex networks involving roads, communications and electricity grids, irrigation systems, grain elevators, farm supply and machinery merchants, rail depots, agricultural research stations and field projects, government-sponsored agricultural assistance centers and the specialists attached to them, and entire towns which act as gathering places and service centers for those working in rural communities. All of this would have to be duplicated in newly opened agricultural lands for which pioneering settlers would have to be recruited. These pioneers would have to want to live in previously unsettled or sparsely settled areas with few amenities.

Unlike previous eras when farming was a way of life for most people and owning farmland was seen as a path to self-sufficiency and independence, these new pioneers will be adopting or continuing an occupation that millions are desperately fleeing around the world—in favor of the excitement and opportunities of the city.

Even if such rural migrations were subsidized (or forced—gasp!), they would take time, probably decades. All the while climate change would be bearing down on crop yields around the world. Would such a grand development project make up for ongoing declines in existing farmland production?

This is just one "solution" offered to us by what I will call the "adaptationists." The trouble is there can be no assurance that their solutions will actually work. A better approach would be to prevent further climate change as much as we are able (knowing that the lags in the Earth's climate system will make more change inevitable for the next several decades). The schemes being offered these days include emergency measures such as throwing sulfates into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and constructing large mirrors between the Earth and the Sun to do the same.

The trouble with these approaches is they are all untried, and we have only the smallest inkling of their unintended consequences. Could we end up with a situation that is worse than otherwise would have been the case?

It is important to remember that when it comes to Earth systems, it is impossible to do just one thing. Whenever we do something, we affect the entire system, and we, as limited beings, cannot understand all the possible consequences ahead of time. We think we are acting on objects, and it turns out that we are acting on networks.

Networks have a way of pushing back at attempts to upend them. But frequently we cannot even see the networks we are affecting until they begin to react to our prodding, often in unforeseen and dangerous ways.

We do not know exactly how our agricultural networks will react as they are forced to change in response to the climate chaos we have unleashed. But we can take a much more humble stance by acknowledging that we cannot confidently predict that simply moving our current system toward the poles will allow us to produce all that we are going to need.

We may be faced with adopting systemic changes that include new ways of growing, more people in more places engaged in growing, changing what we grow and eat, and growing much more of what we eat closer to where it is eaten. Some of these changes are already taking place. But they will likely deepen and widen as climate change bears down more and more on our agricultural systems worldwide.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, November 05, 2017

A friend of mine recently outlined as follows his method for thinking about important issues: Look at the big picture, avoid groupthink, and remember history.

First, the big picture. People too often think only about the narrow field in which they work or the community or nation in which they live. But whatever the topic, there is always a context that includes the rest of world and the interplay of actors and forces in many locales and fields of endeavor.

Let me provide an illustration (not one provided by my friend). If I want to understand the state of renewable energy in the United States, I'd certainly want to know also the state of that industry in other countries including their regulatory regimes; the structure of their industry whether public, private or a combination; and the state of research and development. I'd also want to know how renewable energy fits into the total picture of energy use, for example, its current share of consumption compared to competing sources of energy and its growth rate. Further, I'd want to know about the emergence of electric vehicles, a major new user of electricity, and about the industry that produces them. I wouldn't stop there, but what I've outlined so far conveys the scope of inquiry that I'm recommending.

Next I'd want to check into any relevant claims made in the media and by family members, friends, and co-workers in order to avoid groupthink, that is, believing something merely because I've heard it from others. For example, if someone claims that the dominant form of energy in human society in 2030 will be solar (and someone did), I would want to find the basis for such a claim if there is one and also see if the current trends suggest that this is likely. Just because some smart people believe that something will happen doesn't mean that it will.

Finally, I'd want to know something about the history of the renewable energy industry in America and abroad. What does that history tell me about what is likely to happen in the future? And based on what we know about the history of energy transitions in the past from coal to oil and then to natural gas, are various claims about the speed of the current energy transition to renewable energy plausible? Of course, no one can know the future. But when people make claims about the future that have no precedent, we should be skeptical and cautious.

Of course, these steps—looking at the big picture, avoiding groupthink, and remembering history—require time, concentration and reflection. It's simply not possible to do such research for every issue that crosses one's path. So, humans take shortcuts much of the time. They focus on what they know from their own experience. They recall what they've already read in the media and heard from those they know. They dispense with any serious study of the history of a subject, assuming that current knowledge is all that they need. (For minor daily issues this process may indeed suffice.)

Beyond the difficulty of doing one's own research, there is the difficulty of standing apart from friends, family, co-workers and others in one's social circle. Voicing an opinion that runs counter to the prevailing view can net one ridicule, dismissal and even social exclusion. Moreover, most people don't want to believe that the world they've constructed in their heads may be flawed, perhaps dangerously flawed. If you are the person telling them this, you will probably not be in line for thanks.

The greatest difficulty comes when our research produces information that challenges our own foundational beliefs. This potentially creates a crisis that could require acceptance of a whole new worldview. If accepted, this new worldview can strain relations with practically everyone close to us who may not only be surprised but possibly dismayed by our sudden change of outlook.

There are very few people who can engage in such independent inquiry on a regular basis and retain their mental balance. Being open at all times to the possibility of changing one's worldview can be anxiety-producing and exhausting. In order to maintain peace of mind most people avoid any thorough examination of topics that could force an alteration of their worldview.

It's no wonder then that our political, economic, and social culture encourages people to avoid the big picture, succumb to groupthink, and ignore history. It's much easier to maintain our peace of mind if we simply conform our opinions with those around us and avoid a tedious examination of the facts.

However, the price we potentially pay is that we will get blindsided by what in retrospect seems an obvious problem. That's when most people finally adjust their worldview to new realities. But by then, any damage is generally already done.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

The narrative about Catalan independence is that two major cities, Madrid and Barcelona, are competing for power, and one has decided that the best path forward is to declare independence from Spain and free itself of Madrid's dominance.

Catalonia accounts for nearly a fifth of Spain's economy, and leads all regions in producing 25% of the country's exports.

It contributes much more in taxes (21% of the country's total) than it gets back from the government.

Independence supporters have seized on the imbalance, arguing that stopping transfers to Madrid would turn Catalonia's budget deficit into a surplus.

Catalonia has a proven record of attracting investment, with nearly a third of all foreign companies in Spain choosing the regional capital of Barcelona as their base.

But the spread of independence-seeking across Europe points to something more than just sibling rivalry. In 2016 British voters shocked the world by voting narrowly to withdraw from the European Union (EU). Just this month two of Italy's richest regions held non-binding referendums on seeking increased autonomy from the central government. More than 95 percent of those voting said yes.

The immediate effects of Britain withdrawing from the EU and of Catalonia becoming independent (if, in fact, either actually ends up happening) could be quite negative economically, cutting both off from established trade arrangements that power their economies. (The vague desire for more autonomy among the provinces of Veneto and Lombardy in Italy does not yet spell economic and political divorce.)

Given this outcome, why would the people of Britain and Catalonia seek to disconnect from central authorities? For Britain perhaps the impetus was that most of the people of Britain did not feel they were sharing in the prosperity generated by the country's affiliation with the EU. Certainly the financial elite centered in and around London have prospered, but not necessarily the rest of the country.

In Catalonia, the problem seems reversed. The Catalans are prospering just fine. But Madrid is siphoning off the fruits of Catalan labor and ingenuity and providing little in return.

Both complaints point to a larger and yet conceptually invisible problem. Joseph Tainter in his momentous study entitled The Collapse of Complex Societies explains that complexity is a strategy for societies to respond to challenges. At first complexity works well to solve problems. Later in the life of a society, complexity—a new bureaucracy here, another layer of complexity in the infrastructure there—continues to work but with diminishing returns. Finally, a society now used to solving its problems successfully with greater and greater complexity is blinded by this success and cannot see the point when the returns from complexity turn negative.

The key here is that the returns from complexity are not evenly distributed. And, when such returns go negative, those implementing the changes that increase complexity—usually the people in power—may, in fact, benefit while the majority suffer. And, the negative returns may not just be economic. They may also have to do with perceived status, the workings of justice, public safety, and any number of other civic functions.

When people perceive these reductions in their well-being compared to others, they seek common cause with those closest to them whom they assume feel similarly aggrieved.

Here in the United States I frequently ask friends how much they think San Francisco, Portland and Seattle listen to the dictates coming out of Washington, D.C. The dispute over so-called sanctuary cities for undocumented immigrants is but one example of failure to cooperate with federal authorities. Gov. Jerry Brown sounded more like the president of California than its governor when in the wake of Donald Trump's victory he told the American Geophysical Union that if the federal government shut down satellite collection of climate data,“California will launch its own damn satellites.”

In an age which seems to call out for transnational solutions to climate change, pollution, deforestation, species extinction, and myriad social, economic, and health issues including wealth inequality, cybercrime, and possible pandemics—in such an age we are faced with the strange centrifugal force of devolution as many people lose faith in centralized authorities to solve their problems.

The hugely complex, tightly networked systems within which we live now in communications, trade, transportation and finance have provided unparalleled (but poorly distributed) wealth. They exhibit the economies of scale that attract us because they produce low prices for the goods and services we want. But more and more people are coming to believe that these systems lack the responsiveness needed to address their daily problems.

What they don't necessarily understand is that these systems because of their high efficiency are also very fragile. Their very efficiency means they have little redundancy, and it is redundancy which creates resilience. For this reason, the devolution we see emerging politically may someday be forced upon us in other areas of our lives whether we are prepared for it or not.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, October 22, 2017

Whether you regard President Donald Trump's rejection of America's trade agreements as a good thing or a bad thing, few people understand what canceling them would mean. From an ecological point of view, abruptly pulling out of trade agreements, agreements which have resulted in innumerable long-term investments and commitments, is the ecological equivalent of a reduction in scope.

A reduction of scope means that occupational niches which arise specifically to facilitate trade in shipping by land, sea and air, manufacturing for export, warehousing, finance, insurance, government employment (such as customs officials and coast guard forces) and other trade-related occupations, all are endangered when the scope of their activities is reduced as a result of new trade restrictions.

To understand what this means, we need to understand the flipside of scope reduction, scope enlargement. From an ecological perspective the increase in world trade over the last few centuries has in a manner of speaking allowed local populations to escape the tyranny of Liebig's Law of the Minimum. In the mid-19th century, Justus von Liebig observed that plant growth was strictly governed by the least available of a plant's necessary nutrients. Adding other essential nutrients simply wouldn't overcome the limitation imposed by the least available one.

In the absence of trade, Liebig's Law acts like a brake on a local community, preventing it from expanding beyond the carrying capacity afforded by its least available essential resources. In dry areas, it might be water. In others it might be arable land. In yet others farmland might be plentiful, but a lack of metal mines might prevent the widespread use of metal tools that could enhance agricultural and manufacturing productivity.

All of this can be overcome if, for example, dry areas rich in mineral deposits trade with agriculturally endowed areas that have plenty of water. In essence, the dry areas are importing water and fertile soil in the form of food in exchange for minerals needed to make metal tools. Something like this goes on today. Countries rich in oil but poor in farmland trade their oil for food to supplement inadequate supplies grown domestically.

This type of illustration will seem familiar as a standard explanation for the wisdom of trade. But Liebig's Law does not cease to apply because we have global trade. It now applies to global carrying capacity rather than just local carrying capacity. Because this carrying capacity depends heavily on trade in finite energy sources, that is, fossil fuels, its stability cannot be guaranteed indefinitely. Without a substantial replacement of fossil fuels, which supply more than 80 percent of the world's energy, the current system will collapse into a lower state of organization with far less carrying capacity.

Collapse or at least a partial collapse can also happen if the scope available for obtaining essential goods and services shrinks due to political or economic circumstances. During the Great Depression the decline of global trade was magnified by measures designed to protect domestic industries from foreign competition, mostly through import tariffs adopted by many countries. The effect was a reduction in scope that created even more unemployment through the destruction of occupational niches associated with trade.

We may now face something like this—though whether it becomes severe depends on how far the Trump administration proceeds in withdrawing America from the world trading system and whether other countries retaliate.

Regardless of the Trump administration's trade policy choices, the ecological perspective allows us to see that almost all of the modern world's trade-oriented occupational niches are temporary rather than permanent. In the short run, they depend on a general agreement among nations not to engage in trade wars that result in a reduction of scope, that is, nations forced to live on their own resources. This would, for example, be problematic for the American electronics industry that is heavily dependent on China which produces more than 80 percent of the world's rare earth metals. Those metals are necessary for the production of computers, cellphones or other communications and computing devices. And, this is but one example in our highly interconnected world.

In the long run the limiting factor for trade-oriented occupations is energy because so much of our energy comes in the form of fossil fuels. Those fuels are central to every economy and are critical to sustaining the global logistics system. To assume that world trade at the scale it exists today can continue far into the future without a dramatic reshaping of the world's energy system is a failure to understand that the laws of nature, in this case Liebig's Law, cannot be overcome by optimistic pronouncements about our energy future.

On our current energy trajectory the human race is likely to be headed for a reduction in scope as fossil fuel resources ultimately decline and renewables fail to expand quickly enough in type and scale to address the mismatch between our desires and the supply of energy needed to maintain global networks of exchange.

According to the International Energy Agency, despite the rapid growth of renewables in recent years, combined geothermal, solar, wind, and tide/wave/ocean energy output provides less that 1.5 percent of total world energy. Hydroelectric power makes up another 2.5 percent but is growing quite slowly. Percentages for renewables would have to rise dramatically and soon if we are to avert the twin crises of climate change and fossil fuel depletion.

Ideas for changing our current trajectory abound. But they will not matter unless they are shown to be both technically and economically feasible and until they are widely deployed. A felicitous outcome is by no means assured within a time frame that avoids a reduction in scope and its attendant effects.

This piece draws heavily from William Catton's book Overshoot, the relevant section of which has been reproduced here.

___________________________________

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He is currently a fellow of Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, October 08, 2017

Money is a slippery concept. Today we think of it as paper certificates and coins. But actually, anything that is generally accepted in trade can be considered money. The rise of cryptocurrencies is demonstrating this truth. In wartime scarce but desirable and easily transported commodities such as cigarettes, alcohol, jewelry and valuable paintings can act as currency.

Debt is defined as money owed to another person or entity such as a corporation. It is an obligation to pay the money back, usually by a specified date at an agreed rate of interest. Certain kinds of debt, especially government bonds, are traded daily in the world's money markets. So confident are investors that some government bonds, especially U.S. Treasury bonds, will pay the agreed interest and be redeemed in full at maturity that they treat them as if they were cash—because they can be converted into cash in an instant in world markets.

But is government debt what we think it is? Consider the poor Italians who recently announced that they will try paying for government services with tax credits—essentially reducing a person's tax bill in exchange for services rendered or products delivered. The reason is simple. The Italian government is hard pressed for revenue which is paid in Euros, a currency which the government does not control and therefore cannot create more of.

The tax credit scheme gets around this inconvenience. But it also makes possible a far more interesting possibility. As the writer of the linked piece points out, what if instead of making book entries in a taxpayer's account, the Italian government issued paper tax credit certificates that could be used to pay taxes?

At first this seems unimportant unless one imagines that everyone who is doing work for the government receives tax credits in the form of paper tax credit certificates. Furthermore, what if those certificates were available in convenient denominations much like paper Euros? Since most Italians have taxes to pay, these certificates could be traded for goods at the local grocery store which also has taxes to pay. And the grocery store could pay its suppliers in certificates because they too have taxes to pay and so on.

Pretty soon this form of government obligation starts to look just like money. And while it essentially borrows the work of others, it does not borrow money from them. The government's obligation is then extinguished when the recipient pays his or her taxes with the certificates. (Eventually, with so many businesses accepting such certificates, banks would be persuaded to accept them as deposits into savings and checking accounts.)

All this implies that the Italian government could get back into the currency creation business to help finance its operations—even if it were to print more certificates than it had taxes due. So long as people were willing to trade them for goods and services among themselves, some portion of the certificates would remain in circulation and never be redeemed to pay taxes.

Of course, the government could overdo the issuance of such certificates, and the author offers up several ways in which the amount in circulation could be managed.

Whether the European Central Bank (ECB) would allow things to get to this point is an intriguing question. After all, the whole point of the Euro is to unify the countries using it under one currency, and in the Euro area agreement, only the ECB can issue currency.

This Italian experiment—if it were to be fully realized—would come tantalizingly close to what so-called Modern Monetary Theorists say is possible: Government finance without debt or the necessity of taxation. A government that controls its own currency can simply issue what it needs to pay for its operations. The only reasons to tax anything are 1) to carry out certain social and economic policies favoring some activities over others and 2) to create demand for the currency being issued. If government taxes can only be paid using the currency issued by the government, nearly everyone will have to have at least some of that currency.

In practice, such a currency becomes a convenient medium of exchange and is therefore almost universally adopted.

All of this may seem improbable upon first blush. But two examples suggest that it is broadly possible and even desirable. First, the United States government financed the Civil War through the issuance of Greenbacks, paper money with no gold or silver backing, only the assurance that the government would accept it in payment for taxes. Such money lives on today in what are now called Federal Reserve Notes which the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank will not redeem for anything other than more Federal Reserve Notes.

Second, many people have long predicted that the vast and mounting U.S. federal debt would cripple the country's finances and lead to an inflationary economic calamity. And yet, even as the debt mounts to a previously unimaginable size, the country seems no closer to that calamity than it did 10 or 20 years ago—at least not one associated with the federal government's debt.

What's happening is that the U.S. government is doing something through its borrowing operations that is in its ultimate effects roughly the equivalent of issuing currency. It borrows its own currency from private individuals and institutions and then uses that currency (or rather book entries denoting currency) to call upon the productive capacity of the United States (and to a certain degree the world) to satisfy its needs. Because it has not unduly strained that capacity, this spending has not pressured prices very much. (If the buying power of the currency in circulation electronically or otherwise does not exceed the productive capacity of the economy, evidence suggests that there is little reason to expect general price inflation.)

With the U.S. federal debt approaching $20 trillion and rising, many are saying that a crisis cannot be far away. But the Modern Monetary Theorist would propose an easy fix: Issue currency to buy back whatever amount of the debt is necessary to calm markets. Better yet, buy all of it and never issue debt again. (Doing this over an extended period of time would probably be best in order not to bring chaos to world money markets. And, it would demonstrate that the U.S. government is not "going broke" nor could it ever go broke as long as it issues its own currency.)

Given that the United States and many other countries issue their own currency, why should wealth in the form of interest payments be transferred to the rich who hold most of that debt, when these countries could be debt free?

What the Italian experiment highlights is that governments that issue their own currency do not have to be dependent on private credit or taxation for their spending needs. In fact, as the author of the piece linked above proclaims, it's downright crazy for such governments to borrow their own currency from private institutions and individuals when those governments can simply issue currency as needed. Only those who hold the strings of private credit and therefore benefit from current arrangements have a stake in getting the rest of us to believe that the world can be run in no other way than the one they prescribe.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, October 01, 2017

When the electricity stops in modern civilization, pretty much everything else stops. Not even gasoline-powered vehicles can get far before they are obliged to seek a fill-up—which they cannot get because gas pumps rely on electricity to operate.

Another casualty was drinking water because, of course, in almost every location, it must be moved using pumps powered by electricity. In addition, the reason we remain uncertain of the full scope of the damage and danger on the island is that the communications system (powered by electricity, of course) failed almost completely.

The Associated Press reported that as of September 30, 10 days after Maria's landfall, about 30 percent of telecommunications had been restored, 60 percent of the gas stations were able to dispense fuel and half of the supermarkets were open.

Presumably, these figures represent mostly urban areas where any single act of repair can restore services to many more people than in the countryside where conditions by all accounts remain desperate.

Unless power is restored soon to those areas still without it, many of life's daily necessities—food, water, medicine—will remain beyond reach for substantial portions of Puerto Rico's residents. The consequences of this are both predictable and dire. But the expectations are that weeks and months may pass before electricity again reaches the entire island.

If that turns out to be the case, then those who are able will simply leave their homes and migrate elsewhere, most probably to the U.S. mainland—something they are entitled to do as American citizens. The United States is unprepared for such a massive wave of migration if it develops.

Electricity is the essential pillar upon which the operations of all modern industrial societies depend. And yet, it is something that remains impossible to stockpile in large amounts; nearly all electricity is consumed as it is produced. Its transmission remains all too vulnerable to bad weather which we now know is only going to get worse—not only hurricanes but also ice and snow storms which will increase in frequency and severity as the atmosphere becomes more saturated with water vapor (because warmer air can hold more moisture).

Part of the question the United States and the world will be answering when deciding on how and what to rebuild in Puerto Rico is how much are we willing to spend on making infrastructure climate-change proof when climate change is a moving target. We do not now know how "hard" we will have to make any rebuilt infrastructure in Puerto Rico because we do not know for certain the ultimate severity of climate change through the lifetime of the infrastructure being built. It would be foolish to rebuild infrastructure that will simply blow down or flood out in the next major hurricane or one just 10 years from now.

While contemplating such dangers, the world remains largely oblivious to an unparalleled danger to the electric grid, one that dwarfs what climate change is ever likely to threaten: electromagnetic pulse or EMP.

Two sources of EMP, a coronal mass ejection from the Sun and the detonation of a nuclear bomb at high altitude are real threats. What makes North Korea such a menace is not the few nuclear weapons which the country apparently has, but the possibility that it could detonate one at high altitude and thereby cripple much of the electrical infrastructure of the country targeted. (Whether it has a weapon of sufficient power and the ability to deliver it high into the atmosphere above the United States or another country is unknown. Not surprisingly, the nuclear facilities of the U.S. military have been hardened against such an attack so as to assure a retaliatory capability in the event of a first strike.)

The possibility of a coronal mass ejection of sufficient power to cripple the world's electrical system, however, is not theoretical. Just such an event, known as the Carrington Event, took place in 1859. Back then it dazzled viewers of the sky worldwide while burning up telegraph lines. Today, it would shut down much if not most of the globe's electrical infrastructure.

What Hurricane Maria has done to Puerto Rico reminds us of how vulnerable systems critical to the daily operation of industrial society remain. We have options: one is a more decentralized, renewable energy system hardened against EMP. But we do not yet have the foresight and the will to realize such a system anytime soon.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

The decision has stunned the solar industry which has relied on cheap panel imports to spur the growth of solar power in the United States. It's not clear what remedies the commission will recommend to President Trump who will have final say about how to respond. But the president's often articulated antipathy toward America's existing trade arrangements suggests a punitive response such as a tariff or quota.

Such a response could slow the spread of solar power in the United States by raising the cost of deployment. This would happen just at the point when Mother Nature herself has underlined the need for low-carbon energy sources through the devastating effects of climate-change enhanced hurricanes on American territory in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. In fact, in Puerto Rico, hit by two major hurricanes in a row, the damage was so severe that according to The New York Timesthe island may be facing months without electricity.

The irony, of course, is that had Puerto Rico invested in distributed solar power, a source perfect for a sunny Caribbean island, it might still have had major problems, but not the kind that a devastated centralized power system has visited upon the island's residents.

The case just decided by the ITC may or may not result in large consequences for U.S. solar deployment. But it highlights another issue which the rise of anti-free trade sentiment has exposed. How self-sufficient should the United States or any other country, for that matter, strive to be?

In a globalized world this seems like a retrograde question. After all, the smooth operation of the global logistics system has served consumers and businesses well for decades. Yes, there have been a few disruptions, but nothing so long-term as to seriously call into question the wisdom of dependence on foreign sources for critical goods.

And yet, the increasingly bellicose exchanges between Washington and Beijing even prior to the Trump presidency suggest possible difficulties ahead. China has a near monopoly on the world's rare earth metals supply, critical for modern electronic devices, hybrid engines and certain military technology. And, back in 2010 the country reduced its rare earth metals export quota by 40 percent, possibly in reaction to an incident in the East China Sea.

China, of course, is only one country of many which have become manufacturing centers for international companies. Mexico, Malaysia, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan come to mind.

The argument against self-sufficiency is that it costs more. If every country does what it does best, everyone will benefit from lower costs and higher quality. But do those low costs embody risks not accounted for such as environmental and security risks?

If something is cheap but you cannot get it because of a trade or diplomatic dispute or possibly even a war between two nations, its low price doesn't matter. And if the expertise to produce this now unavailable product is no longer found elsewhere or in one's own country, then the price will no longer be cheap and the disruption will be proportionate to the importance of the product in the functioning of one's society.

For this reason many countries protect their agricultural sector. Lack of food would be a catastrophic disruption. But does America want to revive its own solar panel industry? Won't the solar and other renewable energy industries become critical to the well-being and security of every nation? And, isn't the distributed nature of renewable energy generation a model to be heeded for the manufacture of devices that produce it?

The difficulty in such deliberations may be trying to separate critical industries from ones which are less important to maintaining the functioning of one's society. And, we must also now admit that humans might not be the cause of the next big disruption in world logistics. Extreme weather could knock out the ability of industries concentrated in particular countries or areas to supply world markets.

Absolutes are dangerous. Even the most ardent advocate for expanding domestic and even regional and local production may crave a cup of coffee or a piece chocolate, something which may be impractical to produce domestically in most places. But the case of America's solar panel imports raises the question of dependence for critical products on faraway producers who could at any time stop shipping their wares both for reasons we can imagine and ones we cannot yet discern.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

I may be a member of an endangered species. I prefer a perfect crease in a pair of pants resulting from the use of an actual iron rather than a crease maintained by a toxic brew of chemicals that can make cotton-fiber pants not only "wrinkle-free," but also "stain resistant."

The maintenance of clothing isn't thereby eliminated. It is simply transferred to chemical companies, clothing manufacturers, and purveyors of household products who concoct and apply formulas which require considerable energy to manufacture and deploy. One can adduce many other examples of our obsession with a low-maintenance life. (I will include a few below.) But, I write to contest the whole idea that a low-maintenance existence is in itself a good thing.

In general, entropy obliges us to maintain those objects which serve us. In doing so we must give them attention; we must give them a sort of love. We must become involved with their needs and not only our own.

By abandoning the duty of maintenance we owe to the objects in our lives, we are distancing ourselves from the physical world and essentially sending the entropy elsewhere for someone else to deal with, whether human or non-human.

I used to have an electric razor, the cutting block of which could be sharpened. A jeweler in the building where I worked had the equipment to do it. Later, it was cheaper just to replace the cutting block, and so, equipment that would sharpen it was scarce. Now, a new shaver that I just purchased—after many good years of service from my previous one ended with the motor shutting down—this new one is clearly designed simply as a throwaway.

Yes, there is nothing particularly new about planned obsolescence. But once again the maintenance task has simply been transferred to the landfill operator who must care for the objects we discard. This also shows that we should not conflate low-maintenance with durable.

I am not opposed to durable objects which require little maintenance. But we have created a world of low-maintenance objects which are low-maintenance merely because they are disposable. Sneakers that aren't resoleable are low-maintenance, but not long-lived. On the other hand, well-made wool clothing can last a lifetime with only an occasional cleaning.

In our gardens and on our farms we have transferred the care and maintenance associated with weeding to the world's chemical industry. The consequences of that are not only embedded in our soil, but also in our health care system—and in the degraded ecosystems upon which are lives depend.

Easy care and low maintenance are merely local phenomena. Once we pull back and see the bigger picture, the entropy produced by them creates a maintenance burden on others, on society and on other living organisms and natural systems.

As it turns out, maintenance has gotten a bad wrap. Maintenance is really a form of caring. Modern philosophers bemoan our love of material things. But I believe that we modern, industrialized people do not actually love material things. We wouldn't treat material things the way we do if we truly loved and cared for them.

Instead, the material world has become merely a substrate for our dreams of mastery. We do not want involvement with the material world and all the limitations which that implies. Rather, we want liberation—liberation from its constraints.

We think easy care and low maintenance are steps toward that liberation. But as we have seen, those characteristics only impose maintenance tasks on others and sometimes even rebound to sicken our bodies. More important, they separate us from a material world that should naturally summon our powers of care and concern.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

We are now used to hearing about once-in-a-1,000-year floods. The fact that we are used to hearing about them tells us that they will no longer be rare. In fact, since climate change is at the heart of these events and continues unabated, we can expect that storms practically everywhere will get worse.

That's because as average atmospheric temperatures continue to rise, the atmosphere will hold more and more water vapor. And, as more and more heat gets stored in the oceans, they will provide more and more energy to the storms which pass over them.

Of course, "once in a 1,000 years" only means that the chances are one in a thousand that such a storm will occur this year or the next. In fact, this phrase doesn't actually reflect weather records. As Vox points out, we don't have reliable records going back that far. We have only about 100 years of such records for the United States, and then not for every locale. Beyond 100 years we are guessing about flood severity based on indirect evidence.

Instead of planning based on such long intervals, we will be faced with a moving target—actually a moving target of probabilities—probabilities which are rising in unknown ways at unknown speeds. Even with all of our instruments, models and scientists we cannot keep up with the changing dynamics of an atmosphere continually perturbed by climate change.

But we know the general direction; and what should terrify us is that we cannot really calculate just how bad things will get.

We could harden our industrial, commercial and public infrastructure against such storms, but a move like this would be tricky to execute: What exactly should each installation do? And, such a move would be tremendously costly. Besides, as climate change continues to worsen, to what set of conditions are we supposed to adapt our infrastructure assuming we would be willing to spend the money?

Even if we were to decide to spend the money, if the homes of those working in the industrial, commercial and public infrastructure are destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, who is going to show up to work to run those installations after destructive storms?

Adaptation is going to be much harder than simply using more air-conditioning during the increasingly hot weather. (And, of course, in most locations using more air-conditioning will simply lead to more fossil-fuel use at electric generating plants; that will only exacerbate the problem.)

What Harvey and Irma are making clear is that the infrastructure we have built was built for a different climate and is surprisingly fragile in the face of climate change. When some scientists say that our civilization is at risk, this is what they mean. The things we expect to work and work reliably won't. This will include agriculture as climate change turns increasingly negative for food production worldwide.

Without a coherent plan to address climate change, the world will simply lurch from one climate-induced crisis to another. A focus on the immediate disaster will only make things worse as we do little or nothing to adapt to or to mitigate the warming of the globe.

That's the trajectory that the do-nothing crowd has now put us on. Are we so politically hamstrung and propagandized that we will simply allow this? The aftermath of two of the worst hurricanes ever will provide some clues.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, September 03, 2017

"In media res" is Latin for "in the middle of things." Frequently, it refers to the literary device of plunging readers into some central action of a story (often an epic) and then filling in the details and background later.

The residents of Houston must have felt that they were plunged into the middle of some epic story as Hurricane Harvey dumped up to 50 inches of rain on them and flooded much of the city. Early estimates suggest that this hurricane could end up being the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

Hurricane Harvey is almost certainly an epic story unfolding before our eyes. That means the significance of events and outcomes surrounding the hurricane will only be filled in later--creating analysis, folklore and perhaps even a cultural output on par with that which followed Hurricane Katrina (think: the television series "Tremé").

There will be stories about the failure or success of the emergency response effort. There will be denunciations of those officials who recommended staying put and recriminations of those doing the denouncing. There will be riveting accounts of suffering and also of heroic rescues and exceptional kindness. And, there will be stories of lawlessness and cruelty.

Harvey will almost certainly be styled as a tragedy. The storm is undoubtedly a colossal misfortune, and we should have compassion for those affected. But from a literary standpoint, it is not a tragedy at all. A genuine tragedy requires that the main players be unaware of how their own flawed character is leading them to self-destruction. A genuine tragedy depicts an ineluctable course of events. Nothing and no one could have prevented them. Greek tragedians relied on Ananke, the goddess of fate, to drive the action of their plays.

But humans do know that their actions are leading to climate change--which many climate scientists foretold would result in increasingly destructive storms. Denial of such a link is not the same as ignorance. Denial means the message has been received and recorded, just not accepted.

It is, of course, an irony that the city most associated with the oil and natural gas industry should be struck so fiercely by a climate-change enhanced hurricane. But this should NOT be read as some kind of divine retribution either in the literary or the religious sense. The discovery and use of fossil fuels has long been hailed as the basis for modern prosperity and advances in human well-being the world over. Those involved in such discoveries and the refining and distribution of the output have until relatively recently often been cast as heroes in history, in literature and in film.

More energy--to those who have access to its benefits--has meant longer, healthier lives and rapid development of wondrous technologies which rely on abundant energy supplies for their deployment and operation. The modern technical civilization in which we live relies on continuous high-grade energy inputs in order to function. Without those inputs our society would quickly collapse. If we rail against those who have extracted and refined those fuels for us, we are only railing against ourselves for using them. (On the other hand, if we rail against those who have systematically lied about the climate effects of burning fossil fuels to the public and policymakers, that is another matter.)

It is true that the ravages of climate change have to date fallen disproportionately on those least responsible and least capable of protecting themselves such as island nations now being inundated by rising sea levels and the poor in drought-stricken areas of the world. What Hurricane Harvey is showing us is that climate change will spare no one.

The sadness and destruction inflicted on residents of the Gulf Coast will flicker on television and computer screens for weeks to come. Their misfortune is truly our misfortune--even if we are only capable of feeling it in the price and availability of gasoline.

But we should not mistake misfortune for tragedy--which many of our leaders will almost surely want us to do. They will want to paint Hurricane Harvey as a tragedy. They will use that word again and again, wittingly or unwittingly making Harvey out to be an unforeseen and unforeseeable event for which we humans have no culpability (or at most only a little and therefore hardly worth mentioning).

That takes them and us off the hook for neglecting the causes behind the great misfortune which this storm has become. And, it would encourage us and them to do little to try to mitigate future misfortunes as the catastrophe of climate change descends upon us.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, August 27, 2017

As climate change rips away the icy armor of the Arctic, nations surrounding the North Pole and companies eager to exploit the area's mineral wealth--particularly oil and natural gas--are growing giddy with anticipation.

So reports the Associated Press, though the AP is by no means the first to report this story. The slow-motion battle over the increasingly accessible resources of the Arctic is certainly a story. But the prevailing version of that story lacks the proper context, one that is hard to provide since the implications of global climate change are vast and difficult to grasp.

First and foremost, burning additional oil and natural gas made available by receding Arctic ice is nothing short of insane. But in a world that believes that adapting to climate change is merely an engineering problem, this type of talk persists.

Readers of the AP piece are told that those wishing to exploit the Arctic will have to build the necessary infrastructure to service the mining, fishing and tourism interests that want a piece of these boreal riches. (Yes, you read that right: tourism!)

But if development of the Arctic proceeds, it will be a sign that we are doing far too little to abate the very causes of warming that make such development thinkable. That would imply increasingly rapid climate change, something that will almost surely destabilize a world which wants to exploit the Arctic.

In a world plagued with agricultural areas devastated by flood and drought, coastal cities drenched by rising seas, mass migrations from newly uninhabitable areas, spreading tropical diseases, water shortages, and unimaginably long periods of intense summer heat, it is hard to imagine that nations and private companies will be able to provide the systematic focus on Arctic development needed to extract its wealth.

In short, the exploitation of the Arctic implies stability elsewhere; but a continuous rise in Arctic temperatures which will make such exploitation increasingly feasible implies the opposite.

The unfreezing of the Arctic may itself be one of the most dangerous drivers of climate change. The ice--which has prevented those currently salivating over Arctic riches from getting at them--not only keeps the Earth cool by reflecting light back into space; it also keeps untold gigatons of methane sequestered in the tundra and deep ocean. Once in the atmosphere methane traps far more heat than carbon dioxide.

It turns out that what development of the Arctic implies is so catastrophic that it is hard to understand why we are even discussing it. I am reminded of an old New Yorker magazine cartoon depicting a speaker at a business conference concluding his talk as follows: "And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit."

Most people don't really understand that a melted Arctic will almost certainly accompany the end of the world as we know it, both in nature and in society. Any profits gained as a result will be as monstrous as those mentioned in the New Yorker cartoon.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

I am now in the process of moving to Washington, DC. Making that move while staying on top of my ongoing consulting and commercial freelance writing obligations and attending to various other duties will demand all my attention. I expect to return to regular posting on Sunday, August 27.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Science studies scholar Bruno Latour is fond of the film "Life of Pi" for the metaphor it provides for our current predicament. The main character of the film, Pi, ends up in a lifeboat with a tiger, and not a friendly one. Though Pi builds a raft to give himself distance from the tiger, he must still tie the raft to the lifeboat which holds all the supplies--food, fresh water, and, as we see later, flares. Ultimately, the destruction of his raft forces him to return to the lifeboat and find a way to live with the tiger.

In "Life of Pi" there is no peaceable kingdom like the one depicted by painter and Quaker minister Edward Hicks in the 62 surviving versions of his composition of that name. In "The Peaceable Kingdom" predator lies down with prey and no harm results--a reference to verses in Isaiah depicting an age in which "[t]he wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them."

In "Life of Pi" viewers are constantly in a state of anxiety about Pi's fate. The tiger cannot be tamed. And so it is with the biosphere as we enter the Anthropocene, a geological era defined by the large impacts of humans on the Earth and its cycles. As a post-Enlightenment culture, we have long believed that we are now free of the tyranny of nature. We can learn its ways and master it through our knowledge and ingenuity.

But it turns out that mastery over the Earth is an illusion fostered by its huge resources relative to human populations (until now) and the discovery of fossil fuels that have allowed humans to harness tens of millions of years of stored solar energy in just a couple of centuries.

As the world becomes full of us and our stuff, it becomes empty of what was here before. To deal with this new pattern of scarcity, scientists need to develop a “full world” economics to replace our traditional “empty world” economics.

In the full world we now live in, we are sitting cheek by jowl with Pi's tiger. The tiger, of course, is the natural world which we have sought to put at a distance. We imagined that we could disentangle ourselves from its fate. But we cannot. Because as much as we might wish that humans and nature could be in separate categories, they aren't.

The tiger coming at us now is simply the full world pressing down upon us. The effects of the vast stream of entropy that human civilization produces cannot be placed "out there" any more; nor can we simply run away to a new place to avoid it. The effects we humans are having are so great and ubiquitous that we are close to naming a new geologic era of the Earth after ourselves as mentioned above.

Although Pi eventually finds his way back to civilization and the tiger parts with him and enters the forest, we have no such possibility. We must now dance with the tiger, give him some territory (as Pi does), and limit ourselves in our exploitation of the biosphere's (and lithosphere's) resources.

Nature, it turns out, is not a passive object, but an active agent. It reacts mightily to our provocations. Pi's father tells him early in the film that a tiger can never be regarded as a friend, that any feelings Pi thinks he sees in the tiger's eyes are just projections of Pi's own.

At the end of the film, Pi tells us that he believes he has seen a glimmer of the tiger's own feelings and that these feelings are not always geared to hunting and eating, but at times akin to accommodation if not mutual respect. In this he may have something of value for our comparison. For the biosphere itself is made to sustain us and we are made to thrive in it. But if we fail to understand its rhythms and its limits, it will snarl at us and even injure us for our injuries to it.

Our fear should be that the biosphere's response will end up being all out of proportion to our provocations. In this regard, it is Pi's father who is right about the tiger and by extension the biosphere. The biosphere will not develop sympathy for our current predicament. It can only remorselessly react. That notion should guide our actions as we move about in the only lifeboat we have, the thin membrane encircling the Earth that makes our existence possible.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude. In addition, he has written columns for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen, and his work has been featured on Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), The Oil Drum, OilPrice.com, Econ Matters, Peak Oil Review, 321energy, Common Dreams, Le Monde Diplomatique and many other sites. He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.